Timothy Brown, believed to be the only person cured of HIV, poses near his Treasure Island home on Friday, July 15, 2011, in San Francisco. After undergoing a bone marrow transplant, Browns body shows no trace of the virus today.

Shortly after Timothy Ray Brown moved to San Francisco in January, he was invited to attend a meeting for AIDS activists to talk about scientific research - specifically, research into a cure.

Brown had a special interest in the topic. In 2007, while living in Berlin, he became the first, and so far only, person to have been cured of HIV and AIDS. But he was at the meeting just to listen, and he was a little surprised when one of the organizers asked if Brown would mind being introduced to the whole group.

"He pointed to me and asked me to stand up, and he said, 'This is Timothy Brown - the Berlin Patient,' " said Brown, 45. "I think I turned completely red. But afterward, all these people kept coming up to me and shaking my hand, and wanting to have their picture taken with me.

"People tell me I give them hope. That if this happened to me, it could maybe happen to everyone."

Brown is the proof of principle to scientists, patients and AIDS activists alike. His cure - a stem cell transplant - is a risky procedure and too expensive and difficult to pull off to work for everyone. But if even one man can be cured, researchers say, it means that a universal cure may be possible.

Grants

Last Monday, the National Institutes of Health announced that it was throwing an additional $70 million toward research into an AIDS cure over the next five years - a 75 percent increase over previously planned spending.

The grants will go toward projects involved with the Matin Delaney Collaboratory, a collection of major American research laboratories focused on an AIDS cure. The group is named after a longtime San Francisco AIDS activist. At least $10 million of that money will go to Bay Area institutions.

Other areas of AIDS science, such as research into vaccines and other prevention tools, still draw the majority of U.S. funding, but doctors and activists say this new infusion and new emphasis on a cure is a major first step in a new direction of research.

"The first era, from 1981 to 1996, was just understanding how HIV causes disease. Then there was 1996 to 2011, when we tried to perfect the therapy. And now we're entering a new era: It's all about the cure," said Dr. Steven Deeks, a professor in the UCSF division of HIV/AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital, and one of the lead researchers working on a cure.

AIDS research has dramatically changed since the first cases were reported 30 years ago. Today, there are more than 30 drugs available to treat HIV infection, and people on antiviral therapy can expect to live decades, not months or years.

But while the current therapies are undoubtedly impressive, they aren't a cure. Patients have to take them for the rest of their lives, and while the drugs dramatically improve their life expectancy, people still face long-term health risks associated with the HIV infection and the drugs themselves.

Plus, millions of HIV-infected people, mostly in developing countries, have no access to the drugs. It's impractical and impossible to expect government and nonprofit agencies to fund a lifetime of expensive medications for everyone infected with HIV.

"For a long time, we were just trying to get people to the state where we could treat them and they could live better lives," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH. "But you can't continually be putting people and sustaining them on therapy. The cure, together with prevention, is really going to turn the epidemic around."

The brunt of the cure research focuses on defining and attacking what's known as the HIV "reservoir" - the pockets of cells where the virus hides, quiet and deactivated, while antiviral drugs kill off the vast majority of HIV infection. These reservoirs can lie dormant for years or even decades, but they can be reactivated and they can start reproducing as soon as patients stop taking antiviral medications.

Molecules, mechanisms

So any cure will need to include both the current regimen of antiviral drugs, plus some yet-to-be-discovered therapy that finishes off the reservoir of latent HIV.

Researchers at San Francisco's Gladstone Institutes are hunting for molecules and mechanisms that could be used to draw out the hidden HIV infections so they can be killed. At UCSF, scientists will be trying to both define the reservoir - where and how big it is, and why it's formed at all - and study how that reservoir is connected to the body's immune system.

'Nature of the beast'

"I'm really interested in understanding the nature of the beast," said Dr. Mike McCune, chief of the UCSF division of experimental medicine. "We want to get rid of HIV. That's the goal. But this epidemic has been going on for 30 years, and we still don't even know how to count the number of cells that could be infected by HIV."

Researchers say it's impossible to know when - or even if - a cure may be found. At one time, scientists had hoped antiviral drugs would provide the cure, and the fact that they didn't was a bitter disappointment for many doctors and patients.

Meanwhile, research into a vaccine to prevent HIV infection has stalled many times over. The past two years has produced new and promising research into preventing HIV infection with antiviral drugs, but that's expensive and impractical on a global scale.

Even with new funding and dozens of top researchers now focused on a cure, it's going to be a "tough task," said Dr. Warner Greene, head of virology and immunology research at Gladstone. "Make no mistake, we're setting a high bar."

Patient advocates say the new funding is a monumental step in the right direction. But more money, and more scientists, still need to be funneled toward cure research, said Stephen LeBlanc with the AIDS Policy Project, which has been spearheading advocacy efforts toward finding an AIDS cure.

LeBlanc was the one who introduced Brown at the cure conference this year - and he points out that the Berlin Patient has been an inspiration to more than just those infected with HIV. Two or three years ago, before Brown's case became widely known, it was difficult to get scientists to acknowledge that a cure was possible.

"They had a lot of buzzwords to avoid saying 'cure,' " LeBlanc said. "They'd say they were 'working on activating the suppressors of viral latency.' The first thing we had to do was make it safe to say the word 'cure.' "